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A few topics came up on my radar recently that questioned whether or not AdBlock Plus is a security risk because several websites are now asking users to disable it for their website and claimed AdBlock Plus is a security risk.

That got me thinking about why I really run both AdBlock Plus and Ghostery. I trust both plugins because they do their job VERY well, are generally trusted products by millions of people, and, most importantly, are open source software. However, the reason I run these tools is not the usual "ads are annoying" or "privacy is important" reasons that I see bandied about. I run them because NOT running these tools introduce security vulnerabilities and serious performance degradation into the web browser stack and those using ad servers do not follow the law. Here are a few reasons as to why you should be running *at least* AdBlock Plus:

Ad server operators are notorious for running any ad, including ads that deploy malware. It is not uncom…

Update May 30, 2017: As per OSI, this license has some insurmountable issues. I have retracted the proposal for OSI inclusion as a result. If you used this particular license in any work, I highly recommend moving to a pure MIT license as soon as possible for software and CC0 for other works. Other than government entities in some countries, it would seem to be impossible to avoid copyright and place any given work into the public domain while offering sufficient protection of the original author from spurious lawsuits. I view this as a serious failing of copyright law and thus the real source of the problem is copyright law(s) not allowing for simple public domain dedications by members of the public. There are valid scenarios where public domain dedications are legitimately necessary for the furtherance of the common good. Therefore, only if the law changes would a simple public domain dedication option become possible. Even Creative Commons Zero (CC0), with its best attempt…